{"id":10945,"date":"2025-07-03T18:46:51","date_gmt":"2025-07-03T18:46:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/the-megabill-will-soon-be-megalaw\/"},"modified":"2025-07-03T18:46:51","modified_gmt":"2025-07-03T18:46:51","slug":"the-megabill-will-soon-be-megalaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/the-megabill-will-soon-be-megalaw\/","title":{"rendered":"The megabill will soon be megalaw"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

House Republicans passed their domestic policy megabill<\/a> Thursday after nearly 24 hours of nonstop angst, discord and hands-on pressure from President Donald Trump and allies \u2014 ultimately uniting to deliver his top legislative priority.<\/p>\n

The 218-214 final vote is a major victory for congressional Republicans who pledged to send the bill to Trump\u2019s desk before July 4. Speaker Mike Johnson<\/a> muscled the bill through in the early-morning hours after a full day of meetings with holdouts, huddles on the House floor and gatherings of different factions at the White House.<\/p>\n

One preliminary vote Wednesday was held open for more than nine hours \u2014 what Democrats claimed was a new House record \u2014 as GOP leaders scrambled to secure the votes. Once they did, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries<\/a> delayed final action almost another nine hours with a record-breaking floor speech attacking the 887-page bill.<\/p>\n

The decisive vote ended up almost entirely along party lines. Only Republican Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick<\/a> of Pennsylvania and Thomas Massie<\/a> of Kentucky joined Democrats in opposition to the bill.<\/p>\n

What was not clear upon passage is what precisely a small band of holdouts, most of them members of the House Freedom Caucus, had secured in return for their votes. They were irate about changes that had been made to the bill in the Senate, but GOP leaders were insistent that no further tweaks would be made \u2014 which would require another time-consuming trip across Capitol Hill.<\/p>\n

The holdouts had been discussing the possibility of executive actions and other promises pertaining to the implementation of the sweeping legislation. But Johnson insisted no deals were cut.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe find out where the red lines are, and we try to navigate around them and get a product that everybody can buy into,\u201d he told reporters.<\/p>\n

Angry Democrats, who had been left in a holding pattern most of the day Wednesday and deep into the night, seethed at the situation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have no idea what in the world the crowd that was holding out got for holding out,\u201d said Rep. Brendan Boyle<\/a> (D-Pa.) on the floor. \u201cDoes anyone know? It is a complete mystery to me and to the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n

To most Republicans, however, final passage came as a relief after more than six months of intensive intraparty debates and negotiations about how the centerpiece of the Republican legislative agenda should be structured and what should be included.<\/p>\n

The centerpiece was always set to be an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the signature bill of Trump\u2019s first term. But Republicans quickly sparred over whether those tax cuts \u2014 a legislative hornet\u2019s nest \u2014 should be packaged together with other, easier-to-pass GOP priorities or lopped off to pass separately.<\/p>\n

Trump sided with lawmakers, mainly in the House, who wanted to pass the whole domestic agenda in one piece, and what Trump would deem the \u201cone big, beautiful bill\u201d was born. On top of the tax package, which eventually swelled in excess of $4 trillion, were defense spending boosts, increased immigration enforcement and dramatic changes to some safety-net programs to help offset the costs.<\/p>\n

Republicans seized on rosy projections from White House economists while most independent analysts concluded the bill\u2019s economic impacts would be relatively modest.<\/p>\n

House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington<\/a> (R-Texas) touted the \u201clargest tax cut in U.S. history\u201d Thursday morning and promised a flurry of economic benefits, despite the bill mainly continuing tax policies already in place.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can expect record job growth, investment, repatriation of capital back to the United States, record-low unemployment, record-high wage growth and the lowest poverty rates in recorded history,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

While the tax cuts were the glue meant to hold GOP support for the bill together, it was not always clear that hard-line fiscal hawks and moderate purple-district Republicans would be able to come to terms on a single piece of legislation.<\/p>\n

Those concerns were amplified after the Senate reshaped the bill the House passed in late May, making steeper cuts to Medicaid and speeding up the rollback of wind and solar energy tax credits, while also adding hundreds of billions of dollars more to the deficit than the House-passed bill did<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Key blocs of House Republicans initially blanched<\/a> at the changes, leading to hours of meetings Wednesday between GOP leadership and holdouts in an effort to quell the rebellion. With further changes to the bill off the table, lawmakers talked up the possibility of future executive actions from Trump. White House Budget Director Russ Vought came to the Capitol to discuss the possibility of future spending cuts with hard-liners and how exactly the administration planned to target key programs.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, among purple-district Republicans nervous about a roughly $1 trillion cut to Medicaid, there were major concerns over how medical providers in their districts might be able to access a limited $50 billion fund for rural hospitals created in the Senate and whether the funding patch would be enough to compensate for cuts elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The Congressional Budget Office estimated<\/a> the Senate-passed megabill would increase the number of people without health insurance by roughly 11.8 million in 2034. That estimate was posted before a slate of last-minute changes were made to the bill before Senate passage earlier this week.<\/p>\n

Democrats vowed Republicans would pay a steep political price for passing the megabill, with some comparing it to the health care bill Republicans abandoned in 2017 \u2014 preceding a GOP House wipeout in the subsequent midterms. In speeches throughout the day, Democratic leaders name-checked purple-district Republicans whose districts they hope to target in next year\u2019s midterm elections.<\/p>\n

The minority party had few tools to stop the bill\u2019s passage, and their plans to at least slow it down were at first overtaken by the GOP\u2019s own snail-like progress. But then Jeffries used his unlimited speaking time Thursday morning to lash into what he called \u201cone big, ugly bill\u201d that coddled billionaires, undermined clean energy production and slashed the social safety net, delaying passage until Thursday afternoon.<\/p>\n

“I ask the question, if Republicans were so proud of this one big ugly bill, why did the debate begin at 3:28 a.m. in the morning?\u201d Jeffries said at the outset of his speech, accusing Republicans of trying to \u201cjam this bill through the House of Representatives under the cover of darkness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jeffries took special aim at the bill\u2019s health care cuts \u2014 reading story after story from Americans who rely on Medicaid for their medical needs and calling out the particular Republican lawmakers who represent them. He also mocked Trump\u2019s insistence that he would protect the program.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was going to \u2018love and cherish<\/a>\u2019 Medicaid,\u201d he said. \u201cNothing about this bill \u2018loves and cherishes\u2019 Medicaid. It guts Medicaid.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bill now heads to Trump\u2019s desk, and he\u2019s expected to sign it on the holiday, Johnson told reporters: \u201cWe’ll do that on July 4, potentially, maybe right before the B-2s fly. I mean you just can’t script this any better.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Lim and Cassandra Dumay contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

House Republicans passed their domestic policy megabill Thursday after nearly 24 hours of nonstop angst, discord and hands-on pressure from President Donald Trump and allies \u2014 ultimately uniting to deliver his top legislative priority. The 218-214 final vote is a major victory for congressional Republicans who pledged to send the bill to Trump\u2019s desk before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}